The launch event for Media Sandbox 2009 included an exercise we called ‘Golden rules‘ which is now providing me with invaluable salient wisdom and advice as I put the Transition Towns web platform together. Here’s one of them:

One of the golden rules for platform development which is now very significant to me

To round off this year’s work, they are holding a showcase, and they’ve published a lovely book about it all too, which is beautiful and inspiring. I’ll be going along for sure.

If you fancy going along, check the events page on the Media Sandbox website.

In the meantime, here’s the blurb:

Media Sandbox Showcase & Publication Launch
Tuesday 20th October 2009 | 16:00hrs | Cinema 1 | Watershed, Bristol

The creative media industries are going through a period of rapid change. The uncertain economic environment has made it harder to find the time and space to dedicate to nurturing new ideas. The Media Sandbox development scheme was set up to give new ideas a safe environment in which to grow. Sandbox made six awards earlier this year, to innovative projects researching emerging possibilities in multiplatform technologies. From HMC, Drake Music and bibic’s multi-sensory environments for children with additional learning needs to Indie Mobile’s new music focused campaign tool, all the projects respond directly to the challenges of modern society.

This event celebrates the achievements of those six commissions and will include a showcase of all six, plus open discussion addressing the challenges posed by multiplatform technologies. The event will also coincide with a launch of a new publication that celebrates two successful years of the Media Sandbox scheme and an exciting announcement about next years’ scheme.

16:00hrs:
Project presentations and panel discussions with Nicole Yershon, Director of Innovative Solutions at Ogilvy; Richard Hull, Researcher in Pervasive Technologies at HP Labs; Mark Leaver, Director of Development at South West Screen; and Clare Reddington, Director of iShed.

18:00hrs:
Evening Reception including informal demos of this years’ projects and the launch of the Media Sandbox Publication. Drinks and light bites will be served.

If you would like to attend, please check the events page on the Media Sandbox website, or call Watershed Box Office directly on +44 (0)117 927 5100.

James Richards (BBC Learning Development) and Myles Runham (BBC Learning) co-hosted the event with Clare Reddington (Ished); I designed and facilitated it with help from Jack Martin Leith. There were approximately 65 attendees, made up of 15 BBC folk and 50 creative (and) technology types from around the country.

This report is split into the following:

• Event purpose
• Event outcomes
• Event design
• Event report
• Event documents for download

Event purpose:

• To profile the work and properties of BBC Learning to a community of pervasive media practitioners
• To communicate BBC Learning’s thoughts and ambitions in the area of creating new pervasive media projects with the BBC’s properties
• To work collaboratively over the day to create a range of high concept propositions
• To provide a networking opportunity for attendees to meet and interact

For the attendees it was a chance to:

• Meet and interact with others working in this field
• Gain unique access to BBC Learning commissioners
• Surface and discuss proposition ideas with BBC Learning staff as a group in an innovation lab format

Event outcomes:

At the end of the event, out of as many ideas as surfaced during the day, the three most suitable ideas (for BBC Learning) were identified by the BBC crew. These ‘idea holders’ would then work them over a bit more after the event, negotiate and discuss with BBC Learning and iShed, before one final idea will be chosen. This idea will then receive financial and organisational support by BBC Learning and iShed in order to put together a formal pitch to the Beeb.

In line with iShed’s keen dedication to brokering relevant and constructive relationships between different actors in the world of creative technology, an important underlying theme for the event design was to afford as many productive conversations between the different groups in the room. This was primarily to get the BBC folk to meet and work with non-BBC folk;  so a lot of attention was paid to ensuring that happened.

Event design:

I was very keen to introduce some (apparently) more informal, emotional stuff into this event. Our previous events for Media Sandbox have had a rather rational ‘knowledge’ edge to them – quite cerebral and purposeful – these have been sucessful, but after working with some of the Transition facilitators I wanted to explore some of the more unknown elements of human networking and decision making, and encourage the attendees to explore their responses to ‘ideas’ at different levels (head, heart and gut).

(event designing sheet)

Hence the event was structured to be relatively loose and informal in the morning, with a lot of movement and activity, no tables, lots of networking, some role play, different teams forming and discussing stuff. After lunch we got down to the serious business of brainstorming at tables, introducing a more formal, cerebral atmosphere.

Event report:

Welcome and Introduction

Clare Reddington and James Richards and Myles Runham introduced themselves as hosts of the event to set the context. James gave everyone an overview of BBC Learning Development and the types of project they are keen on.

Mapping and conversations:

Now we know why the event is happening, who the hosts are and what the outcomes will be, it is time to see who is in the room. All of the BBC folk came to the front and introduced themselves – enabling the non-BBC folk to work out who they wanted to speak to.

Then everyone jumped to their feet and we did some fast and furious networking based on a couple of parameters:

• Mac vs PC: human Venn diagram and conversations with one of the others
• How geeky am I?: line up from luddite to uber-geek and conversations with someone similar

(networking in action)

We were going to do a couple of others, but the event had started late so I had to make time, so we had to lose some of the networking. This is a shame, but the rest of the event was designed to make sure that as many relationships were brokered as possible (ie the networking is built into the interventions as well as being a session in itself).

The networking was very popular – always is – but I was surprised at how well everyone took to it and responded constructively.

BBC Learning-ness:

Being that we were aiming to encourage conversation around the department’s interests and commissioning process, and give everyone an idea of what is and what isn’t a suitable idea, we ran a session of ‘what is BBC-Learning-ness?’. As well as helping the group build a shared mental model and set the context for later decisions, it was also a great opportunity for everyone to see the BBC folk pitching in, and reacting to ideas in a short time under a lot of pressure (their gut instinct should come out here). Here’s how it worked:

1. James posed a question to the group: ‘In the app store in heaven, what are the two dream learning apps?’
2. Everyone broke out in groups of 6-ish and brainstormed 2 ideas
3. James and Myles stood by a board marked up with ‘Yes’, ‘No’, ‘Maybe’
4. A group rep came to the board, read out their apps
5. James and Richard classified it Y/N/maybe

(Myles and James and BBC Learning-ness board)

James and Richard had 1 minute to classify each app in front of everyone. Naturally this isn’t a formal process, but it does illustrate their gut reactions to things, immediate questions which pop into their heads, and, interestingly (for me) the things they said while thinking out loud (‘hmm not neccesarily a learning app, but knowledge might like that’). It was also a good excercise to get people working together (the BBC folk were spread out across the room) and further embedding the BBC-ness of things.

It was great fun and had a serious point. As well as this, it revealed something of them to us in a way that was open and human – large organisations can seem all wall from the outside, so good work to them for being game I say.

Although this was meant to be a very light-hearted idea generation quickie, some of the ideas produced definitely sparked off interest from the BBC folk. These ideas weren’t carried forward during the day; it was intended to get everyone in the mood around ideas. I think I could have integrated them better into later work (lesson learnt).

(BBC Learning-ness app ideas categorised)

Ideas preparation, analysis and discussion:

At this point, we needed to see who had an idea to work on in the afternoon. The idea holders identified themselves and how mature the idea was, and whether they wanted collaborators to help (in this age of collaboration-mania, I think it is totally fair to say ‘No, it’s my idea, I know what it is, I don’t need collaborators’).

This is a risky point in the event – no ideas means a radical and instant on the floor re-design of the event, too many ideas means a swift inclusion of a voting intervention… quite a lot of event facilitation relies on doing the sums on the fly; how many tables will we need for later? How much time do we give the idea holders to present their idea? etc. But I diverge into event design-ery pokery.

10 idea holders emerged. The perfect number. Uncanny.

The idea holders had 15 minutes to lay their ideas out on a flip chart sheet (we supplied templates). During this time, the ‘here to helpers’ broke out and did some more BBC-non-BBC networking.

We then brought the idea sheets back into the room, laid them out and everyone had 15 minutes to walk around, discuss, analyse the ideas without knowing whose they were from. Idea holders were not invited to comment or otherwise indicate it was theirs – for them it was a chance to see people reacting to an anonymous idea in an objective way.

Following this, each idea holder then had 3 minutes to present their ideas to the group, answer any questions they may have overheard during the earlier session, do a quick Q & A – whatever they fancied. They brought the ideas to life – which had been anonymous and objective earlier – giving them a face and language.

(presenting an idea in 3 minutes)

In the afternoon, attendees were going to work on the ideas with the idea holders at specific tables, so the ‘here to help-ers’ were also making some decisions as to which idea they were going to work on later. It’s also good practice for presenting to a group etc. etc.

Then we had lunch. Woohoo. During lunch, we brought 10 tables into the room and allocated one idea per table. Having been moving around all morning, everyone was going to sit down, work on one idea, get all cerebral and focused in the afternoon.

(the 10 ideas with names)

Case study:

In order to get everyone in the mood, a case study of actual projects from someone who had been commissioned was in order. Dominic Tinley has done exactly this and gave us an insightful and warts and all overview of some of the work he has been doing.

By now, everyone is at the table they will be at all afternoon, so Dominic’s case study was an excellent topic to get them talking about that in the context of the idea they will be working on.

Workshop working:

All the idea holders had a second template to complete for their idea. We used templates so the BBC folk could assess them from similar angles. There was much thought, scribbling with pens, scratching of chins etc.

(workshop working in session)

Top Three:

Now the crunch time. Which idea is suitable in this context, and why? This is another layer of learning for everyone. I have run events where attendees voted for their favourite idea etc. but, being that that would not reflect the real commissioning process for the BBC, the BBC folk were asked to select their top three.

This is not an easy task for the BBC folk – they rarely get a chance to be together from different departments, and don’t have to make such quick decisions.

They had 15 minutes to assess each idea as a group. One BBC person had been on each table so they could represent it. I scribed while they discussed. It was a fast moving conversation.

(BBC folk rapid decision-making for top three)

There was a clear top three – based on suitability for BBC Learning. Interestingly, almost all the other ideas had great merit and interest factor and the BBC folk felt that they could find other homes for the ideas. Hence it was agreed for each idea to have a ‘champion’ who would help the idea holder connect with someone suitable and interested in the BBC.

Good work all – dishing out tough love is a hard thing to do.

Then James and Myles ran through the decision, firstly looking at the top three and then discussing the others – why they weren’t suitable, why they might be more suitable elsewhere etc.

Closing, and a few jars of ale:

And that was it. Following a few rounds of applause, thank yous, questions etc., we retired to the Watershed bar for a few ales after a productive day. I was delighted to see the groups mixed up and chatting happily, swapping contact details and generally making the most of eachother.

(well earned pint of ale)

Event documents for download:

• Event design document
• Briefing sheets for idea holders

It was fun. We worked hard and focused and produced some interesting stuff. David Wilcox did some fantastic social reporting, the attendees captured their work on video which is gradually appearing, and there are lots of photos on the flickr group. Expect much knowledge sharing; we work to an open innovation model.

A full event report will follow with the high level design rationale and details on the interventions and how you can do it yourself; in the meantime, one of the workshops was to identify the ‘five golden rules’ for anyone thinking of launching a new multi-platform project.

Here are the top five golden rules to consider when thinking about an ‘innovative multi-platform content’ project, as identified by the event attendees:

(the five golden rules as voted by attendees of the event)

Here are the those that didn’t make it into the top five:

(the next golden rules that didn’t make it to the top five)

Here is the full list of all the rules (the top 16 are in order of voting):

• What’s the point?
• Know your target audience
• Know your platforms and their features and constraints
• Identify a desire/need that this product is filling
• A single/simple idea
• Innovate or improve
• Consider potentials, adaptability, flexibility, extendabiity of your concept
• Go Gonzo: create a culture of use; go out there and create the story
• Ask if it makes financial sense
• There are no rules
• Release early and often
• Innovation must involve risk
• Give it a title
• Keep communication simple
• Content must be find-able
• Is it feasible?
• Develop/have a strong idea and stick to it
• New or existing technology used in a compelling and powerful way
• Agree upon a plan
• Don’t spend more than 1/3 of the budget on technology
• Start from what the user wants, not what you want
• Keep it simple
• Ask why it is multi-platform
• Ask yourself if you have the right skills to make it
• Understand the lifecycle and stages of development
• Ensure seamless content interaction across all platforms
• Do you or we have the expertise?
• Know how to measure success
• Can it grow?
• Are you using the right platform?
• Don’t forget your audience
• Platform must be driven by idea not technology
• Platforms must have relevance and value ‘use strenghts’
• Content must appeal to audience
• Interdependence of platform, content, audience
• A clear and adaptable business model
• A clear target audience

Now, we all know that having favourites is wrong, so these aren’t my favourites, but a couple of them really touched my favourite spots:

This one made me think of Nancy White, John Smith and Etienne Wenger and their work on the emerging role of Technology Steward:

(golden rule from event)

This one just simply IS:

Good work all! Full report to follow.

Do you or your organization have a question about how to use digital communication technologies that you would like a room full of experts to workshop for free?

Are there people you feel you could engage with in new ways with these new technologies? A campaign you want to support? A service you wish to provide? An idea you can envisage? A change you want to encourage?

On December 15th, iShed is launching Media Sandbox 2009, its second R&D commissioning scheme supporting research into emerging technologies. As last year, I am designing and facilitating the events and mentoring the virtual facilitation.

Media Sandbox is:

“…a development scheme which offers a ‘safe space’ for collaboration between creative talent, technology companies and content commissioners. It is an entirely unique opportunity for creatives from the South West of England to collaboratively create radical new products and processes – pushing forward understanding and potential usage of  interactive digital media…”

We will have a room full of experienced programmers, designers, academics, project and business managers, artists, writers, innovation people, gamers and other digital media types.

(Media Sandbox 2008 workshop action, CC: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mediasandbox/)

We need some real issues to work on and want to apply ourselves to regional questions. That’s where you come in.

Can you think of something you would like to be ‘workshop-ed’ on December 15th? For free?

Maybe it could become a commissioned project (receiving £8,000 budget and more).

A couple of (very high level) examples:

1. How can we design a campaign to engage our target demographic with our message in an innovative way?
2. Our association needs to reach out to a wider group using a mix of technologies. What’s the best way to do it?

We are collecting questions from as wide a range of organisations as possible on our online network in advance of the event. Attendees will be able to see the questions and who they are from and will decide which ones to workshop on the day. We can’t promise your question will be chosen, but it’s worth a try. You can always turn your question into a proposal for the scheme afterwards.

You are welcome to pose a question to the group whether you come to the launch event or not – naturally you are welcome to come to the event, but we understand if you don’t have time (the event is between 2pm and 6pm on December 15th).

To pose a question for the group to work on:

1. Sign up to the Media Sandbox event network
2. Fill in your profile information – the more the better – it will help provide context for your question
3. Post a message to the group by clicking on ‘Messages’
4. Click on ‘Compose’
5. Type ‘question’ into the ‘To’ field
6. Add the question title in the ‘Subject’ field
7. Add your question in the ‘Message’ field. Please provide as much background as suitable, a clear question and desirable outcomes.

Those links again:

• Media Sandbox event network (for questions and networking)
• Media Sandbox formal registration page (for coming to the event in person)
• More information about Media Sandbox 2009 (about the scheme, proposals, etc.)

It covers all of our strategic planning, the tools we used, activities we pursued (and chose not to pursue), the lessons we learnt and the metrics we measured by. And there are some handy diagrams.

Download the full report here:
Which Widget for What? Media Sandbox 2008 Report

Here’s the intro:

“…Much has been made of the potential of web 2.0 or social media technologies to harness knowledge and network distributed communities, but how easy is it for organisations to effectively use these widgets and websites?

In November 2007, as part of the Media Sandbox commissioning scheme,  iShed set out to explore how organisations could integrate and deploy digital technologies and new facilitation methods to support collaborative research and build a Community Of Interest around a research topic…”

We set out on this trip with a mutual agreement to share our findings with others interested in the suitable application of all this web2.0 stuff in an organisation. I am proud that we got there and are publishing it.

Many thanks to Clare Reddington of iShed for being a pro-active, approriately daring, and wise collaborator.

If you have any questions, do not hesitate get in touch. The only constant is change and the learning never stops.

Download the full report here:
Which Widget for What? Media Sandbox 2008 Report

Other reports from this project:

• Launch event report
• Early case study
• Final event report

This is a brief personal reflection on igfest, the three day games festival which took place in Central Bristol from 19th to 21st September.

I was a voluntary member on the organising team, mentored some of the games, ran a game on the day, and generally helped out. I was immediately drawn to igfest as it combined festivals, games and things that anyone can do for free, and take home with them and play there too.

We will see a lot of ‘Game’ theory entering into the facilitator’s toolkit as well, so I wanted to get some hands on experience of all this stuff.

Also, I have been very impressed by Simon and Simon (the organisers along with Clare Reddington, Duncan Speakman and Helen Stephens) who have been running iglab since they met at the Media Sandbox launch event; the event was designed for people to meet eachother in a collaborative context so I feel broody when I see them together.

Iglab has been gradually building a community around games in Bristol all this year, so igfest is a fantastic example of what you can achieve if you nurture your community carefully and keenly.

This is not an all round review of all the games as I didn’t see or play many of them as I was working the gig. Like I say, a personal reflection, with a scarey picture at the end of the deranged and hilarious Welshmen who I shared a police station with during ‘Journey to the night’.

(Rainbow rain being played)

My favourite game was Holla Lu Lu. It’s easy, simple, quick, engaging, funny, age-less, and encourages everyone to enjoy their immediate environment while making funny noises. It’s very easy to facilitate and everyone enjoyed it.

I was very sorry to miss Bad Taste Party. This sounded brilliant and made everyone think about how very badly us Brits are dressed. I approached someone and asked if they were playing it, as I thought they might have got lost. They weren’t, I was mortified. Good game.

(Mercury began with an arm wrestle)

I was also a big fan of Mercury. As well as having Tom and Mike staying with me, and mentoring the game, I fully bought into Tom’s logic about how team sports have become focused solely on one movement with one goal (to win), hence breeding a bunch of people who can do only one thing. So when Mercury opened with an arm wrestle, moved through chicken noises, into backward football, past a haiku writing session and out with handball played with a huge silver exercise ball, I was hooked.

It was a shame to miss Harp Beat, I heard great things about it from 4 year olds and 40 year olds alike.

Congestion Zone made everyone very happy – essentially a series of mazes, some simple rules and a bunch of noise-making objects…

(Players piece the clue together in Holla Lu Lu)

I was very sorry to miss Sneaks and Blaggers. I hadn’t realised that it would book out so quickly, and it’s not really a viewing game, so I gave it a miss and had some pizza with the moose instead.

The Moose hunt game was brilliant – some technical issues with the mobile carrier aside, it got people outdoors, blending virtual with physical worlds.

(Simon Katan briefs the Congestion Zone players)

Rainbow rain looked hilarious. A barely concealed paint fight; brilliant spectator sport!

And Binocular football – currently doing the festival rounds at the moment – delayed due to traffic, but played later on Cathedral Green – another superb spectator sport with some brilliant comedy commentary.

I was sorry to miss Journey to the middle of the night. It sounded great. But I was acting in it.

As a delirious policeman in front of the old police station in Bridewell, waving my hoover extension around, ranting at the punters before letting them in to be ferried down to the cells by sergeants sledge and hammer (thanks to Joe and Lucy for gamely volunteering at the last minute) to be greeted by Jo and Simon the deranged prisoners to give them a clue to help them on their journey.

(Joe and Lucy as Sergeants Sledge and Hammer)

Given all the happiness around, and the superb location of a proper police station at nightime with real cells down a scarey corridor, and everyone being over 18 and all, we decided to go *dark* on everyone, and there was much shouting and screaming and banging of doors, honking of the bicycle horn, and so forth…

If anyone felt it was over the top, we’re kind of sorry and kind of not. We thought it was worth pushing the boat out for that special touch!

(Simon and Jo, the deranged prisoners)

All in all, a fantastic weekend, brilliantly organised, excellently and generously executed, great people and lots of games to enjoy and take home and play again.

One of the participants said that she couldn’t see why schools couldn’t run a lot of the games we ran as they needed no paid for equipment, instantly engaged children, encouraged them to imagine, collaborate and share their experiences while framing ‘competition’ in a less aggressive manner than ‘traditional’ sports… Well said!

Well done all!

• Igfest website
• igfest flickr group
• iglab website
• PM Studio website
• Moose hunt website
• Simon games

If you are wondering what to do on 19-21 September, and can make it to Bristol, come along to igfest. With Simon games and iglab at the core and a group of us volunteers around it, the ‘Interesting Games Festival’ looks like it is going to be fantastic.

Igfest website

Since meeting at The Media Sandbox launch event and then being commissioned to invent a game (Comfort of Strangers), Simon and Simon have been building a community around interesting games in the region for some time.

The festival features a range of different games from different creators – some technical, some lofi, some sporty, some geeky. I’m mentoring a couple of them and those alone will be worth the effort. All of them will be fun, inclusive and good for you. So I can’t say it enough:

Come to igfest! Even better, volunteer for us and get access to Bristol Festival and a cool tee-shirt

I’ll be there. Here’s the blurb:

Open Studio Fridays

iShed have recently taken over the top floor of the Leadworks building in Anchor Square and opened the Pervasive Media Studio.

Inspired by Jelly in New York, we’re opening the studio each Friday to anyone interested in casual co-working. From 9.30am to 5pm our doors will be open to people of any profession/discipline/sector to come and work in our space. We offer chairs, tables, wireless, a change of scenery and interesting people to bounce ideas off.

So, from Friday 2 May, bring what you need to need to work (laptop/mobile) and head down to the Pervasive Media Studio, directions here: http://tinyurl.com/28pcg4

Please email admin@pmstudio.co.uk if you are planning on turning up so we have a vague idea of numbers.

The Pervasive Media Studio, opened in February 2008, brings together the computing, communications and creative industries to research and develop new forms of digital media using wireless, mobile, display or sensor technologies. With collaboration across industry, research, academia and community groups, the Studio is an initiative led by HP Labs and Watershed.

http://www.ished.net/2008/04/24/open-studio-fridays-at-the-pervasive-media-studio

We are planning for the final event to wrap up this year’s Media Sandbox commissions and give the community another boost with a physical gathering.

For background, you can read about the launch event, and the high level case study about the blended facilitation approach we took to the project as a whole.

Suffice to say, we want to wave farewell to this phase with a satisfying ‘whoosh’, and welcome in the new phase with an open and inquisitive ‘oooh ain’t that cool’ noise. And I’m keen for the event to afford as much open learning as possible while we’re at it.

It’s going to be a mix of serious workshop (knowledge transfer stuff about the actual business of the projects doing R&D), judging panel on the projects (for more support), exhibiting the projects’ work, playing some games, and an open opportunity for anyone to pitch their idea for cash and a Pervasive Media Studio residency.

And a village fayre. With bunting. And tea. And I have bought a new horn specially to honk at twitterers.

As always, it’s free and anyone can come. Official blurb here:

From public fountains to bluetooth fountains, street games to shop windows, over the last three months the six groups of Media Sandbox participants have been working on new applications in pervasive media.

This final Media Sandbox event is your chance to play with the prototypes, discuss the challenges and watch the final project pitches as the Sandbox participants present their work to a team of industry judges. And, at the end of the night, one project will be presented with a further £8,000 production grant.

Plus your chance to win £1,000

The event will also feature a pervasive media pitching session with a chance to win a £1,000 development grant and residency at the Pervasive Media Studio. Enter your idea here.
(Event link and booking here)

Come along. It will be fun. And we will learn.

Event link for more information

Introduction

This is high level case study about the blended facilitation work ongoing with the Media Sandbox commissioning scheme managed by iShed. Here is the descriptive blurb:

Bringing together leading technology, artistic and media talent, Media Sandbox is a new commissioning scheme to support South West companies/organisations to research emerging possibilities in digital media.

The theme for 2007/2008 is pervasive media. By supporting a community of research around this cutting-edge theme, Media Sandbox will encourage business growth, share knowledge with the wider sector and reinforce the reputation of Bristol and the South West as a centre for cutting-edge R&D.

Traditionally, this type of commissioning involves a call for bids, distribution of cash to successful bidders, some relatively private research and development, and a ‘showcase’ event at the end where the bidders tell us a few things and say thanks for the cash.

We felt that this commissioning construct could do with some spring cleaning by introducing community-type thinking and free open source software. This case study is a stab at reporting that…

This is an outline of the case study which I have worked on and co-presented with Clare Reddington and Emma Scott from iShed at an Arts Council England conference, and a Unicom conference. You can view and download the presentation from slideshare:

See the presentation on Slideshare

We wanted to open up and share the projects’ findings with a wider audience, involving more people in the actual process and research, spreading the knowledge that the projects generate, and thus hopefully broadening the learning opportunities made possible to sponsoring a small bunch of people to do R&D. So we decided to consider it from a ‘community’ perspective.

We also wanted to explore how to use free software to support wider learning in distributed communities.

There is a lot of hype, waffle and evangelism about ‘social software’ but precious few case studies showing how you actually use it; how you put it together, what frameworks you need to make sense of it, what worked and what didn’t, and stuff like that. It is now possible for anyone to walk into a community centre or library, access the internet for free, and use all the tools we used to do your own thing – start a campaign for example – so how can we help with that?

All the software we are using is freely available on the web; this is a much mooted benefit of the ‘web2.0′ movement but how do you use it and what resources does that require?

The cost is in the knowledge required to stitch it together and understand how to facilitate the system – so we wanted to explore and publish that too.

In a nutshell, Media Sandbox aims to invest in local people to do cool stuff in a new area called ‘Pervasive Media’. By investing in these people, they get some time to explore the topic and thus generate and share knowledge about it, develop new products, meet others interested in it, build a base of knowledge in the region, and thus attract more people to do cool stuff the region. (For the official line, have a look at the website).

The community construct

We modelled the whole thing around a community construct in order to set everyone’s expectations of who owns the knowledge generated (everyone apart from the more secret stuff around the core IP).

Sure, the winning projects were sponsored, but the deal is that they share what they are learning with anyone. So you can consider it as a Community of Practice (where the projects are working full tilt to produce new products) within a wider Community of Interest (where anyone with an interest in this area can join in discussions etc.), all facilitated in the centre by iShed.

(Community model for Media Sandbox)

The Long term: the Community of Practice in a three year view

This phase is the first in the three years that iShed is running. So, once a year, the Media Sandbox projects are a structured short vigorous phase of doing stuff, with goals and targets and agreements to share their work. You could see them as ‘generating knowledge objects’ for wider consumption but I’m trying to avoid buzzwords, honest.

The longer term view is that these phases are ‘early seeding’ for the regional network and ultimately, people will come together to do their own ‘innovation’ projects without sponsorship. But ‘innovation’ is a risky business – most of us are busy getting our lives and businesses and services together to afford an R&D team; so we really want to extract and publish as many lessons learnt as possible to bring that risk down…

(Media Sandbox in a three year cycle)

The Community lifecycle

David Snowden said that Communities of Practice without a clear end date will become flaccid and wiffling (not his words, obviously) and thus must have their death built into their life. Totally agree; keep focused. Understand your lifecycles.

Here is how we modelled the CoPs’ lifecycle, and what would happen at different points. Now I’m a believer in serendipity and the risks of over-engineering, but if you are planning something focused, it is very useful for everyone involved to know where they exist within a framework, and what is going on. The context, and their roles, if you like:

(Community of Practice lifecycle with related phases and activities)

Knowledge ‘assets’ at different points of the lifecycle

Another way to plan with this lifecycle in mind is to consider what knowledge could be created where and when. Again, I’m aware of the risks of over-engineering, so consider this as a framework. The current fashion is to ‘tut’ at planning in favour of ‘affording emergence’. I’m a fan of this theory but suggest it’s not entirely suitable in many contexts.

We did not prescribe this to people by way of beating them with sticks and measuring their output on a clipboard – we used this as a communication and planning tool for ourselves to assess what might come out of the process and how to handle it, nurture it across the two worlds and generally ‘afford it’:

(Sandbox knowledge assets mapped to the community lifecycle)

Blended facilitation

‘Knowledge’ lives in people’s heads but it is also a social construct. It evolves, or transforms, through moments when people come together to share what they know. These gatherings can be in the ‘physical’ world (meetings, offices, community centres, pubs, parks etc.) or ‘virtual’ world (blogs, forums, telephones, wikis, letters etc.). increasingly, we are using both worlds to help groups discover what they know and what they are going to do about stuff.

Physical meetings are expensive, but highly productive in terms of helping people meet eachother, generate new ‘knowledge’, agree high level stuff etc.. Virtual tools aren’t so great at that, but they are cheap (free in our case) and effective ways to build on what can be done physically, and prepare and follow up on physically generated stuff. The trick is to work out what activity to do in which world.

The trick is to work out what activity to do in which world. It’s called ‘blended facilitation’.

All of the launch event’s design had this built into its theory from the start. You can read the event report here. Here is our plan of how we approached the process. At the moment, we are in the ‘open innovation’ phase, largely using the virtual tools to share findings from the projects.

(Blended facilitation planning for Media Sandbox)

An example of ‘facilitating a bit of knowledge in both worlds

One of the first hurdles we encountered in the project was that there isn’t much publicly available knowledge about what ‘pervasive media’ is; no-one really has a clue. We had heard that the big corporations have been exploring this and building their understanding of it, but obviously that’s their private business. So we had to generate our own understanding of it as a group.

At the physical event, we built our own mindmap of what we thought, as a group, ‘pervasive media’ is. Everyone in the room was invited to grab some post-it notes, write words on them and stick them on a board. Two volunteers ‘grouped’ these keywords to make sense of the group’s words, producing a public model for us all to see and relate to (a representation of the knowledge in the room).During the day, everyone could come and move the words around, add new ones etc. You can see Dan and Pete doing the grouping on the left picture below.

At the end of the day, we transcribed this mindmap using a free mindmap tool on the internet, and published it online. Anyone could see it, and edit it as they wished. There it is on the right hand side of the picture.

So, we used the opportunities of a physical event to do something that is very tricky to do virtually, and then published it online to share our findings with a wider audience (anyone on the internet).

(Producing a mindmap at a group meeting, then sharing it online)

Things we are doing

We are now in the open innovation phase, using the free internet tools to share the projects findings around the world (to the Community of Interest, you could say). Naturally, all sorts of stuff is going on; here is a list of it:

(List of things we are doing)

Who is doing what?

It’s all very well having blogs and wikis and twitters and telephones and instant messengers and mailing lists and emails and carrier pigeons, but what on earth are we meant to do with them to achieve our goals? We are not all early adopting highly adaptable engineers with a passion to explore new technologies.

In fact, many of us are baffled by all this stuff; in fact, many of us are so baffled by it that it makes us worry that we don’t know enough, and if we are responsible for introducing these to our organisations/campaigns/clubs etc., we feel stressed and stupid, and I think that sucks. As well as this, people are now inundated in a tsunami of information generated from wide variety of sources, and we don’t want to add huge amounts of unnecessary noise in people’s lives, further stressing them out and distracting them from their work.

So we planned who would do what, and how that could be best afforded by the free technology we had to hand. We don’t know if this is all successful; this is part research and our intention is to produce a report later about what worked and what didn’t so others don’t have to re-invent every wheel.

Here is a rough socio-technical diagram of who is doing what:

(Diagram outlining the various activities around the projects)

How are we doing it?

It seems obvious in retrospect, but how did we work out how to facilitate it? Below is a highly simplified but robust basic model:

1. The projects write fortnightly research journals (blogs in the Community of Practice). We remind them of this regularly and they do it. If they don’t, we have ways of making them talk (semi-serious threats that I will come to their offices and bug them for example, but I haven’t had to do this yet so it must be a sincere enough worry for them)

2. Once a month we write a newsletter which we send to the mailing list, reporting on the activities and drawing out the common themes which are appearing (using a free email tool sent to the free-to-join mailing list).

(Communications and facilitation plan)

That’s basically it. Anyone is welcome to post their own comments to the research journals and the projects will respond. Likewise, anyone is welcome to post mail to the mailing list.

We could ‘facilitate’ more conversation between the Community of Interest members on the mailing list, or push the projects to write more regularly, or do active reporting from other groups exploring this area, or other pro-active facilitation and editorial work, but we agreed at the beginning to take as non-intrusive an approach as possible in order to see what gets used. We are keeping a log of the number of journal entries, and website visitors etc. and will reflect on this at the end.

If we were commercial publishers, we would be much more active in order to drive up our site visits in order to sell advertising. If we were flogging a social networking platform, we would gear the whole thing towards vigorously encouraging people to ‘expand their networks’ in order to build our platform’s popularity (and thus sell advertising or premium services). If we were in an organisation, we might be actively seeking participation in order to meet organisational targets focused on success criteria.

There are other ways for the projects to work together, and to meet others who are interested (the pub for example).

A quick note about IT people

We have used free open source software. That does not mean it is all web-based; some of it we have put on the Watershed servers. You can go entirely web-based, but in this instance we are working within an organisation. This means we work with the ICT department, who get the software working. If we were entirely web-based, we would do it ourselves (a whole other blog post), but we’re not.

This is for the people in organisations who think that people in ‘IT’ are basically a painful obstruction (and for those in IT who think the same about their users): talk to eachother!

I have noted in the past few years that there has been a trend for the software vendors, agencies and consultants to cast a bad light on IT departments, and suggest that all this new social software can bypass them. I think that this is irresponsible.

It encourages expensive outsourcing. This not only costs an unpredictably large amount of cash (don’t start me on UK public sector IT outsourcing), but also generates bad vibes in the organisation, while effectively guaranteeing that no knowledge about how to use software is kept in the organisation. As well as this obvious knowledge gap and increasing dependency on external service providers, it means that those in the IT department don’t get a chance to learn about how to service their users’ needs properly. All of the applications we used are free open source ones, and anyone with some technical knowledge can sort them out.

This self-fulfilling prophecy can be avoided. Go to see the IT teams. I know they can be odd, but they are enthusiastic, and don’t forget – they actually like technology, which has to be a good thing if you are looking for someone to advise you on technical solutions. Some of their work is about protecting stuff and security, and they may say no to stuff, but this does not mean that the next step is to dash outside and get an external outfit to build a new whizzy trendy expensive solution. The next step could be to talk more and work on the problem together (you are working for the same organisation).

In light of this last paragraph rant, this is dedicated to Oliver (photographed above) and his team in the Watershed who is a great example of how things can be with IT. He does the IT stuff, and, after sometimes a bit of initial resistance (usually for very good reason) is calm and helpful. He is part of the whole gig; He does not see it as an ‘IT’ job; their department (ICT) sits in ‘Comms’ so their view is about supporting communications; he even named the beer they sell in the bar (seen behind him in the photo).

He is strategically understanding, tactically responsive, and operationally patient and pragmatic. He knows his stuff and relishes it, and when we did things that broke the technology, he sorted us out without making us feel small and dumb (although he tells me there is the occasional slip but he’s working on it). Maybe there is someone like this in your organisation?

Watershed is a great outfit who encourage their staff to think ‘out of the box’ (Oliver even has his own consultancy in his spare time: Entuplet); and as such, is not the standard. But it is vital to forge these intra-departmental connections and bridge any personality or political gaps you may see therein; avoid the silos! Break those walls down!